This post is about setting up the Festival Speech Synthesis System to output speech through MPlayer playback. This is necessary if the built-in output modules, like ALSA or linux16audio, do not work for you. This can also help to increase the quality and performance of the synthesized audio. (For Slackware Linux, for instance, MPlayer is the best already-installed option.) Once you have built Speech Tools and Festival following the instructions in the INSTALL files, you can specify MPlayer for output in your ~/.festivalrc file by adding the following lines: